


i'd like to die

by ghostmachine



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-05
Updated: 2015-08-05
Packaged: 2018-04-13 01:42:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4502964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostmachine/pseuds/ghostmachine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You wonder idly if this is what Icarus felt because when you crash you feel a burning in your chest, in the lungs you don’t need and in the blood you’ve stolen.</p><p>//</p><p>Carmilla's perspective before the final cut of episode 19.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'd like to die

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the Anberlin song. A quick reaction to today's events.

You’re chasing another co-ed freshman across the quad when you hear her. Your mouth is twisted into a smile, watching Mattie run ahead, terrorizing the innocent students unfortunate enough to find them out at this time. It’s _fun_ , this night of insanity and sisterhood and carnage. You haven’t killed anyone--you _won’t_ kill anyone, but you’re not sure you can say the same for Mattie. Nevertheless, you’d missed your sister in the past few decades, and you’re wrought with pent up rage over everything that’s happened, everything that has built up over three centuries on an earth that has never wanted you, so you’re willing to overlook the bodies strewn across the lawn, willing to overlook them because they mean nothing to you. No one here does.

Almost.

You’re honing in on a petite, blonde girl, thinking of ripping off her backpack and holding her to the ground because it’s been so long since you could let this part of yourself loose, so long since you made someone scream in fear, since you were the reason someone’s veins ran cold and not the other way around. But then you hear her.

“Hey, dead girl! That’s enough!”

You stop dead in your tracks because surely this can’t be happening. You’re not surprised they’ve come to protect the campus, but you honestly thought she’d be smart enough not to pick a fight with you. Not when she knows you’re angry. Not when she knows why.

Mattie’s still running ahead, unaware that you’ve stopped, and you turn to where you heard the voice behind you. You think you hear yourself laugh when you see them, an army of 20 something women with bows and arrows and misguided fury, but you’re hardly in control of your own body and you can’t be sure of anything anymore. Lawrence is there, her face smeared with black war paint and what looks like blood under the moonlight. Her second in command, the one that had been so annoyingly hanging around the past few weeks, is standing next to her, bow raised and looking pissed as ever.

You feel it again, that rush of adrenaline, the one that comes with a reminder of your immense power, your immortality, your apathy. You flash your retracted fangs, ones you’re sure are thick coated in crimson, because the animal in you tells you to intimidate.

And when they hold fast, the animal in you tells you to attack. You rear back, ready to lunge, ready to destroy the people who have threatened your life again and again, and you don’t feel guilty because any idiot who chooses to pick a fight with a vampire has what’s coming to her. _It’s the way of the world_ , you think as you growl, _the weak cannot survive_. And the only way to show yourself you’re not one of them is by giving in to the part of you that has granted you strength.

So you leap, low and long, and you vaguely hear the cry of “she said enough!” before you feel it, a shooting pain through the heart you’d forgotten you had, and before you know what’s happening, you’re falling helplessly to the ground. You wonder idly if this is what Icarus felt because when you crash you feel a burning in your chest, in the lungs you don’t need and in the blood you’ve stolen. Your head is spinning beneath the vast universe above you; you feel the warm blood seeping into your soft t-shirt (also stolen), and you look down to see the arrow sticking out of your chest.

Your head falls back and it hits you all at once: the pain, the deservedness, the will to live and the will to die so confusingly intertwined. You can’t help the scream that tears from your throat, and you hope, more than anything, that Mattie hears. The amazons seem to have judged you sufficiently disposed, and you faintly register their footfalls near your head, running in the direction of your sister. In your dizziness, as you grow weak, you think you hear the call of your name, not the one you’d chosen but the one you were born with, the one you’d introduced yourself as in this new world.

You wonder how many sisters will die in the wake of your own as she rushes to your side.

You’re in and out of reality now, half of you beneath the stars and the other half within them, and you wonder, as you often do, who determines the rules of immortality. It’s when you feel a warm hand slip into your own that you remember your mother, remember how easily her seemingly infallible power was dismantled by a group of teenagers.

You never really stood a chance.

You feel shaken from the animal you were moments before, and, forced back into humanity just as it drains from you, there’s only one thing you can think of, one thing you desire more than the death that feels imminent. So you whisper it to the stars in their silence and to Mattie in her panic, you ask for the death you’ve already died a thousand times.

“Laura.”

Mattie’s arms are around you, lifting you, and she’s saying “Carm, we can’t,” and “we have to leave,” and “shit” when she surveys the wound; “you are not allowed to die,” and “mother said silver was a myth, dammit.” You use what little energy you have to shake your head, cradled in your sister’s arms, and you think you feel tears leaking from the corners of your eyes. Your sister grabs wildly at the arrow and in her uncontrollable strength, she breaks the shaft clean, and you scream again as you feel the arrowhead shift inside your chest, digging into your heart. Mattie’s screaming, too.

There’s a beat and you’re looking in each other’s eyes and you know, you know, that it will nearly kill you to get what you want, what you need, but you steel yourself against the thing that threatens to destroy you and you move to sit, move to plant your feet on solid ground again.

“Please. Laura.”

And when Mattie heaves a heavy sigh of defeat, you grip her tightly, and you stand with her, because of her, and your feet drag across the earth you’ve just pillaged. You feel on fire. You feel like smoke the thing that pulls you forward.

You’d crawl back to her if that’s what it took.


End file.
